PITTSBURGH—Two groups of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute have received a total of $10 million in grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to build automated farming systems. One is for apple growers and one is for orange growers, but both are designed to improve fruit quality and lower production costs.

PITTSBURGH— Sun Microsystems, Inc., is teaming up with Carnegie Mellon University to support the continuing development of Alice, the university's innovative, Java technology-based computer programming environment that teaches students to program Java software while having fun creating 3D animations, stories and video games.

Discover magazine's December cover story features the "50 Best Brains in Science" and the editors have included Luis von Ahn, assistant professor of computer science, on their list. They cite his work on human computation, including his reCAPTCHA project to improve Web security while digitally transcribing old books and periodicals and his games with a purpose (GWAPs) that use human intelligence to help computers overcome their shortcomings."I don't think we've even scratched the surface of what we can do," von Ahn told Discover.

For the first time, Carnegie Mellon teams took the top two places in the ACM-ICPC East Central North America Regional Programming Contest in Cincinnati on Nov. 1.The Tartans— computer science sophomores Tom Conerly and Alan Pierce and electrical and computer engineering senior Celestine Lau— completed seven of the eight problems in 1,287 minutes to take first place and move on to the World Finals April 22, 2009, in Stockholm, Sweden.

Popular Science has named Tartan Racing's self-driving SUV, Boss, to its 21st annual "Best of What's New" list, featured in the magazine's December issue.A year ago, Boss won the $2 million DARPA Urban Challenge race in Victorville, Calif. "Boss drove the course at up to 30 mph and took corners hard, finishing almost 20 minutes faster than its closest competitor," the magazine reports. "Its performance suggests that self-driving cars might not be so far off after all."

SCS Distinguished Career Professor David Farber was one of nine IT luminaries asked by ComputerWorld magazine to tell incoming President Barack Obama what we need to do to tackle America's ongoing decline in global technological competitiveness.

PITTSBURGH?A 21st Century "pen pal" program in which students in Pittsburgh, South Africa and Trinidad and Tobago exchange explorable digital images of their communities is the focus of an international trio of art gallery shows featuring the giant panoramas created by the students. The show, "GigaPan Conversations," will run Nov. 4-16 at Artists Image Resource (AIR) on Pittsburgh's North Side. A special event, open to the public, will be held from 5 to 6:30 p.m., Friday, Nov. 14.

PITTSBURGH—Judith Klein-Seetharaman,a research scientist in Carnegie Mellon University's LanguageTechnologies Institute, has received a $100,000 grant from the Bill& Melinda Gates Foundation to use computational tools in the searchfor new anti-HIV therapies.